THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 11-02-03: PAGE TURNER

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 11-02-03: PAGE TURNER; The Sounds of Sadness

By Hugo Lindgren

Published: November 2, 2003

Four years ago, Damien Rice was playing in an Irish rock band called Juniper and, to impress a record label, he wanted to write a couple of uptempo tunes. But sitting in his room for three straight days, he was unable to compose a single decent thing. Finally, in frustration, he hurled the guitar, which wasn't even his, onto the bed. It bounced off and hit the radiator.

Rice scrambled over to pick it up, and worried that he had busted his friend's guitar, he held it up to his ear and played a chord. Quite unexpectedly, the song ''Eskimo,'' complete with melody, lyrics and a lilting, slow tempo, ''just tumbled out of me,'' he said. A new spontaneous method of songwriting was born.

Juniper would not survive to benefit from this breakthrough. In short order, Rice tumbled out of the band and onto his own solo path, making a debut album called ''O,'' which imbues simple folk tunes with a combustive spirit. In an age when singer-songwriters can be heard emoting from every untended mike, Rice distinguishes himself with a powerful voice that carries both grace and grit, and a batch of beautiful, churchlike melodies that rise and fall with startling dynamic force.

The 29-year-old Rice does not exactly tell stories in his songs. As you might expect from an artist who creates in such fits of inspiration, his lyrics have a raw, extemporaneous feel. Though they have disparately allusive titles like ''Cannonball,'' ''Volcano'' and ''The Blower's Daughter'' (what is a blower?, you might ask; ''Somebody who blows things,'' Rice would say, unhelpfully), they share an emotional quality that Rice describes as ''yearnful.'' Another word might be ''sad.'' ''Melancholic'' also works. In fact, almost every song on ''O'' comes on like the heartbreak of the century. It is testament to Rice's expressive powers that he is able to generate such astonishing intensity within this narrow, well-worn track.

This intensity particularly comes across in his live shows, where the crowds typically sing along to every song, like a volunteer choir. Alternating between delicate finger-pickings and hard-strummed chords on his battered acoustic guitar, Rice brings out a harder edge on stage, almost like Springsteen, ''Asbury Park'' vintage; his talented backing band (drums, bass, cello and an exquisitely ethereal vocalist named Lisa Hannigan) anticipates his every inflection, sometimes evaporating into the background, other times joining him in vigorous crescendos. Their performance is miraculous, considering, as Rice says, that ''we never rehearse. For some reason they get what it is I do. I play something once and, voom, they're on it.''

Songs that just tumble out, a band so good it doesn't need to practice, a growing presence in America that recently netted him the coveted Shortlist Music Prize -- what more could a sensitive Irish lad yearn for? Those guitar-hurling moments are surely a thing of the past.